Behind the Bastards - Episode 7: Uprising: A Guide From Portland: Resistance Through Mutual Aid

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Thousands of Portlanders decided their city had failed them. So they decided to take care of each other.Host: Robert EvansExecutive Producer: Sophie LichtermanWriters: Bea Lake, Donovan Smith, Elaine Kinchen, Garrison Davis, Robert EvansNarration: Bea Lake, Donovan Smith, Elaine Kinchen, Garrison Davis, Robert EvansEditor: Chris SzczechMusic: Crooked Ways by Propaganda Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods. Listen to the Shadow Girls on the iHeart Radio app, on Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mama, what does the chicken say?

Listen to the Shadow Girls on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the Shadow Girls on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every week, I'm going to be talking about all the things I find fascinating about the NFL and I'm doing something that has never been done before. I'm opening my DMs. DMs now open. Listen every Tuesday and join me on the bench. Subscribe now and listen to the Bench with Benetta podcast on the iHeart Radio app, on Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get out of here.

The first thing that comes to mind is just like the power of mutual aid. The smaller events really build the community ties together and just it enables people to like lean on each other for safety and for any resources and pretty much anything that somebody needs. These smaller like well-being based kind of events like it keeps everybody together. And I think I mean there's so much power like mutual aid really is the way of the future. So this is basically just a precursor to like what I feel like will be a world like void of police and like constant state violence is we'll have these networks and mutual aid communities that will basically make that obsolete. So that's really huge for us. That's Jedi, a local organizer and musician. As the protests in Portland and around the nation moved into their third month, Governor Kate Brown announced that the feds were pulling out of the city. With the announcement, the crowds of thousands that had come out in force to protest the federal presence shrunk.

By the second week of August, ongoing protests drew only a few hundred people into the streets each night. For the people that wanted to defund and abolish the Portland police, the federal drawdown meant that it was time to get back to the real fight. Months of being gassed and beaten together had given this community of protesters a powerful sense of shared purpose. At the same time, the drop off in numbers raised the specter of burnout for activists and pointed to a long road ahead. Systems of mutual aid began to spring up both out of need and out of a desire by many to finally start building the world they wanted to live in. To narrate the next part of this, here's Donovan Smith, a local Portland journalist and one of the authors of this series. After more than two months in the streets, protesters in Portland were exhausted and traumatized, but ready to return to the real fight of defunding the police. But the enormous protests of early June were now months past, and after the wild circuits of violence that was fed occupation, people were tired.

And there were questions about how to direct the attention of the city back from Trump to the violence of Portland Police Bureau. Jacob Burroughs of Direct Action Alliance talks about organizing exhaustion. Well, to be honest with you, it doesn't really like everyone, everyone falls off, everyone gets tired and falls off and it's the solidarity that comes into play at that point. So, I mean, I'll take months off where I just can't anymore, where I'm just exhausted to the bone, where I literally have nothing left to give. And during those times is when my comrades come in and do what they need to do. And then when they're tired, that's when I come in and do what I need to do. And that's how we kind of keep it perpetually going is that you've got to be there for folks when you see someone who's, you know, people, that's the problem. It's fatiguing.

There's a huge toll. Organizing takes a huge toll on people, even just organizing one event. It takes three days of my life away from my kids, from my responsibilities at home, from what I need to do. And it's exhausting, and that's just the organizing part. You know, you still have to consider the emotional toll that it takes to go out and do this and put yourself on the line. You have to take into account the threats that you get from the right. You have to take into account the threats that you get from the government. So, there's all of these things and no one is just a super person that can go and power through it.

And that's a big thing, a big misconception, I think, is people think that the faith is, you know, there's some people who their faith has become prominent or their names become prominent. And people think that it's all them and it's not. There's a huge, huge effort behind everything of support, of mutual aid that keeps everything going. So, the reason it's been able to go for 10 years isn't because there's people who have been able to keep going for 10 years straight. It's because every time someone falls back and can't do it and needs a break, someone else, we are lucky enough to be in a community. And that's how it keeps on going is that every time there's a hole in the line, we have comrades who are willing to step back in and fill it up. And that's how we've been able to kind of keep this momentum going is because there's always someone who's willing to step up when someone has, when another person has kind of reached their limit. And that's how you keep it going is by building those connections, those trust bonds and those solidarity connections and mutual aid connections where we're all helping each other out.

We all have to be there for each other. Using social media and telegram, the community stepped up to fill holes in the line. Nightly actions began to be organized autonomously. Anonymous calls to action with post locations, mostly a different police precincts for the Portland ice facility, and people would show up to the protest. If the police were going to continue to brutalize people, then protesters planned on wearing them down and exhausting their budget. Every night of the week, people assembled at some park around the city and would march to a different precinct, yelling, chanting and standing in the street for hours until the police would charge, clearing them out with gas, batons and brute force. While these actions were referred to as DAs or direct actions, the nights often consisted of protesters hurling more insults than anything else, adding in an occasional dumpster fire to mix it up.

Despite the nightly actions beginning to follow up, predictable pattern that usually ended with police roll rushing people down, unlit neighborhood streets for the crimes of yelling in the road, PPB press releases portrayed each evening as an intense battle with dangerous radicals. These claims were not borne out by the arrests that they made. The charges leveled at protesters arrested were almost all IPO or interference with a police officer. The charge that they could file if you did not move fast enough when they bull rushed IPO was one of the charges that DA Mike Schmidt had announced on August 8 that his office would decline to prosecute. Thereafter, nearly all protesters charges were dropped, possibly to compensate for the loss of legal clout. Portland police ramped up on the brutality. Acts of minor vandalism would be answered by baton charges and any protesters unable to outrun the bull rush would be knocked to the ground, body slammed or beaten and then often left lying on the pavement with no attempt made to arrest. Police made it very clear that their intent was to punish protesters, whether or not they had legal recourse.

It was an exhausting period. However, in stark contrast to the brutality of the nighttime actions, by August, protesters were spending the days building on the mutual aid networks that had already existed in Portland and expanding them in new ways to support the community. But what is mutual aid? To answer that, I'm going to turn this over to activists on the ground who are implementing it. PDX street medics formed during the summer and we'll talk more about their work later, but here's their definition of mutual aid. It's bringing some amount of equity where there is none, you know, in this very small sense of like the street mix. If someone can't afford repairs, usually they would have to go into debt to get that repaired at an auto shop where usually they would be upsold several thousand dollars in repairs they don't need. So where we step in, we are saving them that bill and then being able to make sure they're able to keep other needs met and through that action is a small amount of equity where there would be none.

I was just going to say, kind of piggybacking off Cypress's point, I kind of see, you know, what we're doing as a, you know, I think it's kind of trying to challenge the current system. You know, and in this system is a system that has so many, so many flaws and I think that mutual aid is kind of trying to address some of those flaws or try to mitigate some of those flaws. In the sense that, you know, kind of live in this, we live under capitalism, you know, we live under a system that tolerates, you know, homelessness, you know, we live under, yeah, I mean, a system that oppresses so many minorities and stuff like that. So I think that just what mutual aid is and, you know, specifically maybe our role is kind of at least the way I see it is challenging that system of capitalism challenging, you know, being like, hey, like, you know, you don't, you know, we're going to try to just help people not based on, you know, gaining anything out of it, we're just helping people because that's what we're supposed to do as humans. I think that's something that we really need to keep in the center of our minds we need to think about mutual aid is that the people who lose the most in our current system have the lead, tend to have the least ability to change anything. And that is, that is one of the core print like motivating factors behind mutual aid, where it is people who are really like living truly paycheck to paycheck or don't even have any stable income and are living in a car and it's like slowly slowly breaking down. There's nothing to do about it. These are the kind of situations in which that little bit of extra help can really mean that that person can continue to have a life, and that life can continue to be good, and that life can continue to be something that's worth fighting

and that way, those people can continue to fight for their own lives. If community support doesn't really happen, and mutual aid is really just a fancy word for community support. If that doesn't actually happen, those people are going to be able to fight because they're trying to survive. And we need to be able to get a little bit beyond survival in order to really organize and fight and resist on the scale that is necessary for dealing with the problem that we're facing. Something that I talked about a bunch in this or in this group is that I actually sometimes don't think that organizations can provide mutual aid. That instead, people have to provide mutual aid. And that vibe, because that principle isn't about, like mutual aid is about seeing connectivity in women, like acting within communities. Whereas charity is all about, like, creating this other that you're providing. And there's like a lot of thinking and a lot of like apologizing that happens in that relationship that mutual aid really seems to be civilized. Some mutual aid groups existed in Portland prior to the George Floyd uprising. As COVID swept the country in spring, new mutual aid organizations popped up all over the city. And some groups that were already active looked for new ways to help. Rose Hips, a medic collective has been around for 11 years. They began making hand sanitizer and distributing it around the city at the beginning of the pandemic. As protests intensified, they worked to reverse engineer chemical wipes to help with tear gas and pepper spray. Medics loaded with carts filled with water, energy drinks, and eye cleaning kits were a common sight every night. James A. Rose Hips street medic describes the early days of the uprisings.

Yeah, I remember the first time that I went to a protest. After the pandemic, the uprising began to happen at the same time. I think it was a peninsula park. And like, we just brought a bunch of hand sanitizer, and we're like, I don't know, let's walk around and hand sanitizer out to people. And we also have these masks, so let's hand these things out. And like, all of our supply was gone within like half an hour. And there was a large, a whole park full of people at that time. And so, you know, initially it was just handing things out to people before the marching began. And then once the protests really picked up steam and started to be responded to with more repression, we started to ask ourselves, like, what else can we distribute basically. And one thing that street medics usually do or that is really trying to do is to flush out people's eyes if they've been even pepper sprayed or tear gas. But that necessarily creates aerosolized particles from people's eyeballs, because you're squirting water into people's eyes with high velocity. And so we're like, this doesn't feel like a safe activity anymore. Can we hand out pre-portioned bottles of our preferred eye wash solution? Yes, we have all these bottles lying around. And so like, let's do that. And then someone asked, you know, these chemical weapons removing wipes, like, what's in these can we make our own? And then some very smart people who are not me, like, figured out the recipe and created a whole manufacturing apparatus to produce and distribute huge numbers of chemical weapons wipes every day.

And then because the demand kept increasing, particularly as the violence increased, and people use the products and then we're like, we really need these. These are great. And people, you know, they saw us around, maybe who we were. We started to put our name on things just so it was clear that, like, it's us building up this trust of the community and not some other random group. Then people started to just sort of like, the demand created the whole chain of events. And because people already knew us from distributing hand sanitizer, we had a lot of goodwill with, I would say, community groups who wouldn't ordinarily think to themselves, radical leftist street processors are people. But like churches and whatnot who do a lot of work with people living outside were like, oh, okay, you seem to be more or less on the same page with us. So that's how those distribution networks happened. Other groups that were already on the ground were the PDX General Defense Committee and Defense Fund PDX, who raised bail money and held to make sure that protesters made it home and jail support waited outside the central precinct every night with food, hot drinks, and support. The witches had already been present before the summer handing out water bottles and supplies. Symbiosis PDX had begun as a coalition of mutual aid groups in 2018. However, when COVID hit, the work connecting communities and mutual aid expanded.

So yeah, at the beginning of 2020 before COVID hit, Symbiosis was mostly focused on, at the time, our project Merck or a municipal eco resiliency project, where we were working on kind of connect again with that dual power lens, trying to consolidate like food access and production infrastructure for the community, as well as like doing some housing rights work. When COVID hit, we were really small organization, and immediately just kind of like called this 60, 60 org wide coalition call to be like hey radical left. How do we talk and deal. What do we want to do about it how can we support each other and doing that and through that work, we were able to kind of more succinctly find what gaps in the radical left infrastructure there was so that we could work on filling that need. One of that was creating a hubs around town. There, there was a few already existing and stuff so that's where we created share, or the symbiosis hub and resource exchange program, where we were able to be some of the first, first on the ground responders to making sure that our communities have the PPE they needed when we were being told that we, that we shouldn't have PPE because we should save it for other people. So we, we were distributing PPE, we'd organize the solidarity stitches which were both producing their own masks and kind of teaching each other how to sew and learning basic organizing skills, and how to interact with one another in this directly Democratic but we're also activating the community by creating these groups, the solidarity stitches group online that allowed us to then increase our production to being able to basically hand make masks that nobody could find anywhere.

Numbering in the thousands. And, and getting and partnering. We also created the solidarity fund. This is my solidarity fund which basically was not only giving individuals in the Portland area who were experiencing economic hardship and response to the COVID pandemic. Directly we were giving them funds like people who needed medical expenses covered people who needed transportation needs covered, etc. But as well as well as grassroots organizations that needed money to continue their vital programming for example, Portland Action Medics and slash the Rose hip medic collective, we were able to make sure to get them multiple thousands of dollars to continue the hand sanitizer project that they were doing. From there, we were able to slowly grow through our mutual aid program through share and solidarity stitches, the solidarity fund into also expanding within ourselves for this education and outreach work that we were doing to further further within our organization and out in in the general public educate about Communalism mutual aid what it means to be an accomplice things about the radical left movement that have been forgotten or never learned. This grew to encompass connections with the Warren Springs Reservation, distributing supplies, PPE and clean water with fires igniting the spirit. When the water main for the reservation broke. When the protests began, symbiosis moved to make sure that PPE and resources were available there as well. We were printing zines and showing up at protests at the protests we were also the first group on the ground essentially to provide PPE recognizing that yes this uprising is going to happen regardless of the risk because the the need is that great but we're going to do that and seed a culture of taking care of each other. So yeah in distributing zines and and educational material of other sorts and stuff and getting people plugged into organizing.

Other mutual aid formed in the early days of the protests fueled by the desire to help out however possible. Early on snack mom was realized that they were not interested in running from the police, but they can make sure that the people in the streets had food and supplies. I'm a snack mama number one I go by Shiba where I guess we're mutual aid. Yeah, we hand out snacks and waters and things that nature anything you know anybody would need. So those things like that stash medical supplies. Any like extra like masks or gas masks or protective gear that we can possibly get our hands on lots of stuff. I mean there's been a lot of random stuff that we put out there is just whatever the needs are but mainly just snacks and drinks. And I'm snack mama too. I've already been docked so I'm not even worried about my name. I go by Amanda and. Yeah, that's pretty much what we do mutual aid. Yeah. How did you get started like when. When did you first start coming to the out to the protest like how did you get started coming out to the protests. What was the impetus for you to come out. Well, when the whole George Floyd video was released and I seen that it was it was mortifying. I cried. Because it was it was definitely just hard to watch again again and again and again and again and this was just kind of the last all for everyone I you know I feel like. And then there were protests going on downtown. So we went and checked them out.

And we after that we started going out pretty much every night after that and just checking them out. I don't exactly remember when it was but we had started up with an ex partner of mine now he started. I remember it was the beginning of June I drug them with me. We went check it out. Yeah. So then after that we had started cooking. We're cooking downtown. We did that for like maybe a month to or two. Don't start PDX. Yeah, don't start PDX. Yeah, so that was us. And then August 15 there was a domestic dispute between me and my partner. Who was part of Don't Start PDX. Yeah, part of Don't Start PDX. Yeah. And then after that, I mean the the original snack van he was supposed to get that.

And then after the domestic dispute, the owner of the van pulled out from underneath him was like you know I can't support this. Then he offered me the van and then me and her had this van and we're like OK what can we do with this. So then that's when we started doing. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Snack mamas. It took us a minute to come up with a name. But eventually we did.

But at that point, people kind of already knew who we were. So then we came out with snack mamas and that's what we've been doing ever since. I remember seeing you out when you were doing the Don't Starve. What really was the impetus to feed people? I think we just wanted to support the movement. Honestly, we're a couple of chunky girls. We were no match for these officers that are trying to chase us. Trying to find bushes or holes to hide in. This is too much for us because I cannot run for crap. The first time I knew that that wasn't for me, I'm standing there and all of a sudden I see this metal object moving toward me and it's on fire and it's spinning. I instantly start freaking out and I take off and I start running and I'm like, okay, this isn't for me. I can't outrun objects. I can't outrun the cops.

We didn't have any gas masks or anything yet. We're stuffing our faces with stuff, trying to breathe still and protect ourselves. It was hard times, but we wanted to support in whatever way we could. I think that's where we started doing that. This is Roxanne Gay, host of The Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams. Now, what is The Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask? Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind and that could be anything. Every week I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book or maybe some music or a comedy set, something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary Original Podcast, The Roxanne Gay Agenda, The Bad Feminist Podcast of Your Dreams, every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal. And I am Troy Millings, and we are the hosts of the Earn Your Leisure Podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance.

We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sport and entertainment. From DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross, and Shaquille O'Neal, I mean, our alumni list is expansive. Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships, and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in depth and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know. We talk to the legends of business, sports, and entertainment about how they got their start and, most importantly, how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game? Unclear as how to stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The Earn Your Leisure Podcast is available now. Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. Baby Beluga.

So who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. For other people that wanted to protest but didn't feel comfortable going out alone, Comrade Collective connected protesters to each other, sparking the connections that helped sustain the movement. That's kind of a tough one to summarize. I guess the best way to say it is that community has kind of been a limiting factor for a lot of people in protests. Right around the time of 4th of July and right after that, Shark Youth started becoming a meeting point for folks through social media, through telegram. And from there, there's been several different iterations, disabled Comrade Collective, Care Collective, soon to be queer Comrade Collective as well, all kind of forming from that, I don't know, locus of just like community, just like folks trying to find the necessary connections to get their ideas off the ground.

Yeah, I mean, for me personally, I just sort of started sitting in a park with a sign, just asking people if they needed buddies. I was going to be there anyway, I figured like it was something easy to do and I started a Twitter and one thing just sort of snowballed into another. Now here we are. Disabled Comrade Collective had formed to meet the needs of people with disabilities or who have alternative needs to be able to participate in protests. Yeah, so how Disabled Comrade Collective started was kind of like, so I'm disabled and chronically ill, so like I can't be on the ground all the time, it's like here and there, and then when I am, it takes a lot out of me. And so, Sylvan, who is like the main person of handling Disabled Comrade Collective, they also are disabled and chronically ill and so they just kind of like, we were just complaining on Twitter, like they were like, man, there needs to be a group for disabled and ill people that have different needs and neurodivergent and then everyone was like, yeah, and then it just kind of went on to Sylvan and they were like, I guess I'm doing this thing. So that's how that started.

The Ewoks also formed early in the protests, but through the course of the summer, they found that their mission changed. Ewoks is a humanitarian aid coalition made up of crisis and medical workers, refining integrated medical and mental health care that's trauma informed and harm reductive in nature. This service model was really adapted from another organization that we worked with as organizers called White Word Medicine. And they've been the attention of national news recently for their CAHOOTS program. However, looking at the situations in Portland and the socio-political inequities that are being enforced every single day, it became increasingly clear that the Britain's model was going to need to look a little bit different. So we beefed up our teams and we got a hole off the ground side and now we've sort of morphed into like a whole bunch of different things. We do protest work still. We're committed in supporting the community for as long as that needs to happen. One thing that became increasingly clear as public reliance on the police force has begun to reflect the police force's ability to protect people and serve them. Ewoks has really taken a look at what the city needs most and our shift was born out of seeing a complete lack of actually reachable mental health services within our city.

Costs are prohibited. Access to those actual things within standalone buildings does not work for many patients and it also leaves our houseless communities severely lacking as always in services and outreach. As we began looking at adapting our model and taking a look at what this community needed, one of the things that struck us most was that there is a complete lack of alternative resources to police involvement. And while Ewoks is not there yet, we would like to envision a future where we have a place in helping form a service that can do just such a thing. Meeting in the front of the federal courthouse during the Fed War, optical block began doing eye exams, helping people get prescriptions and glasses, organizing around the mutual aid tents of riot ribs. As riot ribs imploded at the end of July, the number of mutual aid, quote, blocks organizing services to protesters and marginalized communities exploded. These groups organized around identifying and helping with one community need at a time. Protesters set up a wide ranging network of alternative organizing to help each other outside of the frameworks of the city or capitalism. In many cases, the blocks were explicit that in an abolitionist framework, the goal was to meet needs without the charity and violence that often accompanied the state and more traditional types of assistance instead organized as a community to get people's needs met.

As activist Mariah explains, there was a block for everything. I don't say I have a favorite, I am just amazed by people being able to come together and do that. I've seen job block, I've seen stuff I couldn't even think of and I'm like that's just amazing. I think it's amazing for this little community. I wish people would know more about this. I wouldn't say know more about this but get more involved because the community is just doing it and we protect us and it's amazing. As August continued, community events and mutual aid fairs became common. Mending block could repair your clothes and made Baclava's for anonymity at night actions. Beauty block could give you a manicure but also made bath bombs and care packages for jail support. Community art therapy happened weekly as people tried to process the stress and brutality. Tech block assisted people with computers and devices. While we don't have time to cover every group that arose during that time, we can have some of the activists describe how and why they formed. Didi explains plant block. So plant block literally came out of mutual aid. It formed out of Mac already being in contact with a bunch of community members already having his own garden kind of thing set up. And then just pulling everybody together and creating like vigils with flowers or provide people with just like vegetable bags and stuff like that. So like nowadays if you had any kind of like well this was certainly true.

I mean we're not having as many because it's so cold and wet now but like a lot of the community events that we would hold. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match.

And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Half of those vendors that would be at these community events literally were formed within this movement. They didn't exist prior to George Floyd. So seeing how the tragic death of him and many others fallen before him have kind of, in a way, been a catalyst for strengthening mutual aid in our city. And anybody who's been on the ground going to these events has seen it with their own eyes. We created different mutual aid groups that formed because of us just coming together so often.

And the more that we come together, the more we realize we don't need to rely on the state to feed and clothe and keep us safe. During the Fed War, cars were damaged by riot munitions and had their filters clogged with powdered tear gas. Portland police developed a habit of repeatedly attacking protestor vehicles, protecting marches by stabbing out their tires. Those snack mamas had their vans impounded in trash for handing out food and water. In response, PDX street mechanics formed to help people repair their cars and provide vehicle assistance for protesters, but quickly enlarged their focus to help with other transportation needs. Here, they explained how they formed. The Portland Street Mechanics started kind of just on Twitter primarily because there were calls for people's cars getting to repair

after having them be damaged out in protests. It very quickly expanded well beyond that because car repair isn't something that you can do at protests. And that was one of our first things is like, oh, no, we're actually just doing community car care. By moving away from the protest scene actually allows us to focus on other things and actually focus on the marginalized communities that tend to be very active in protests, but are also the reasons why we are protesting. And that was a big thing for us in our initial framing was not necessarily just helping protesters kind of manage their day-to-day needs, but also helping to support the communities that have historically been marginalized and historically been oppressed so that these protests don't need to happen. We should not have to go out and protest.

And a big part of that is building the world that we want to see. So we kind of quickly moved into that perspective. I think in a lot of ways we end up providing a lot of support for other blocks. So a lot of the people that we help and the people we reach out to us are people who are using their vehicles for mutual aid. And those people absolutely get like care from us. They get support in terms of making sure that their vehicles are reliable and safe so that they can provide their own kind of like practices. Because a lot of other mutual aid systems or like organizations are about like just giving stuff away and providing those goods.

The service providing component kind of like breaks with that a little bit. So like we haven't really been able to kind of meet up and go to a lot of like the or like some of the fairs or some of the kind of like mutual aid meetups because there's no spot to work on cars. So when we've run into some problems with that with like people being fine with people distributing food, but then we're like, oh, can we do an oil change in your parking lot? It's like, no, we can't do that. So we end up having to get really creative in terms of where we do our work and how we actually like just like logistically organized with other people. When P.T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865,

what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American side show. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it all. In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grimandmild.com.

Just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. I call the union hall and say it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right?

James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade over, we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK Tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next is Elaine, my colleague in the streets and my partner in writing this podcast. The cycle of nightly protests and daily community building and mutual aid would continue unabated, and on September 5, Portland had its 100th night of continuous protest.

The event was marked by a care fair featuring many of the mutual aid groups that had formed recently. PlantWalk had vegetables, sprouts, and seeds that they were giving away, and Careblock offered massages to protesters and tea. Symbiosis tabled books and zines, and people ate donated food and listened to speakers and music by local musicians. At one point, the car caravan, a reoccurring car protest frequented by people whose social distancing needs made other types of visible protest harder, came past honking horns and waving signs declaring that black lives mattered. Mack was on the ground that day. I think a lot of folks, once things went off in Minneapolis, and once we had our first big riot here in Portland, we knew something was going to happen. We knew that there were going to be some protests and stuff. Last a little while, I don't think anyone at the start of it really called 100 plus days a continuous protest.

When did you realize this is not a normal, not just not a normal Portland protest, this isn't like a normal Portland summer of protests? And it would continue to not be a normal summer of protests. That night, Portland police pushed protesters blocks away from the East Portland precinct, gassing families in their homes, and at the beginning of September, Oregon began one of its worst fire seasons on record. As one of the last marches commemorating the 100th day of protest, wound through the St. John's neighborhood of North Portland, Mariah remembers how the sky slowly dimmed as smoke began rolling into the city from fires burning from the south and east. The day it started rolling into town, I was actually at the big march in St. John's because we all started coming back and we were just coughing and everything. And I was like, what the fuck is going on? I looked in the air and I was like, okay, it's smoke from a fire.

But I was like, but where? And then obviously, you know, 24 hours later, we started becoming hell. But how much it just shows like the community transition to mutual aid and aiding like fire survivors and victims, me as well. I also did like, I don't know, I raised like $5,000 and went shopping and dropped them off. I also got a place near Lloyd Center and then out in Milwaukee. But it was so amazing to see the community be able to come together and help people. Dry conditions and hot winds sent fires sweeping four states. Oregon was enveloped in the worst fires the state had seen in decades. Smoke from multiple blazes blanketed the region, making breathing impossible and devastating huge swaths of the state as thousands evacuated and whole towns were consumed by fire.

With no evidence, far right media exploded with rumors that Antifa and BLM were starting fires. Despite public officials trying to counteract the rumors, it was too little too late. The fear-mongering rhetoric led scared individuals in right-wing militias to stay in fire areas, hindering evacuees, and to set up armed checkpoints and fire zones to harass anyone they thought didn't look right. Reporter Alyssa Azar went out to the fire zone to talk with evacuees and report on the fire response. The community came together and kind of a great example of we protect us, you know, manifesting right before our eyes. Fuck, there were people that were like rallying together trailers to go help people evacuate their barn animals and take them to somewhere safe. So, yeah, I mean, that's what we went there for.

And it's so funny because I believe the day before I went to Malala or the day before that, so one or two days before I had tweeted something and I was totally joking, but it was also very serious. It was along the lines of, like, you know, right-wingers on Twitter are saying, you know, Antifa started the wildfires. Meanwhile, every fucking leftist on Twitter at the time was like, hey, what's the most efficient way to bring a fire extinguisher to a protest? You know, because at the time there was also a fire risk and the protests were happening and this is something people were super concerned about. And, you know, we were making jokes about these circulating rumors. I really did not think in a matter of two days they would manifest into a full-blown, like, actionable conspiracy theory. Alissa soon found out how serious those conspiracy theories were being taken.

At the time, the witches had showed up and they had brought a bunch of swagens filled with supplies. We were on our way to, I think it was at the time, the airport, because that's where the firefighters had told us that they were going to have the firefighters be stationed as well as be taking supplies. So on our way there, there was, have you ever seen those signs where it's like green, yellow, red, and it's like a fire danger sign and the arrow points wherever? So the arrow was like all the way in the red and it was like, leave now. So, granted, we stopped to take a picture of that because it's, there's just this like, you know, field of like tall grass on the side of the road, leave now. It was just a very picturesque moment, something really eerie about it. The road is like completely empty, but every now and then you can see like a line of cars trying to evacuate. But anyways, we pulled, we pulled over.

Wow, I haven't thought about this in so long. But yeah, we pulled over to take this picture and Justin and Sergio are kind of still standing next to the car. And this is public property. It's on the side of the road. It's not anyone's like yard or anything. And they're still by the car and I'm like in front of the sign and there's some like tall grass. I'm kind of couched down taking a picture of it. And I'm like focused on the picture and I hear someone talking at first I thought maybe it was like Justin and Sergio, but I look up and there's three dudes with rifles.

Just, you know, pointing their rifles at us and it took a bit for me to register what was going on because I was really confused. And I got up and they started interrogating me. And I'm answering, but I'm still like really confused because I'm like, okay, they're not cops. But why are they so offended and so aggressive and hostile like I, I was legit just like, I could not figure out what was going on. And then they kept asking questions, you know, like where are you from? Why are you in the city? Or are you taking a picture of this? And started talking about like, because we all had our press credentials on, we were all in plain clothing and, you know, slowly like based off the questions they were asking it slowly started to kind of click for me.

But even when it clicked, I think that just kind of made me more confused because like we were literally all tweeting about this jokingly last night. But somehow in fuck literally two to three days this like rumor manifested into a fucking conspiracy where people are holding people at gunpoint militias are holding people up at gunpoint. It's, it's just wild to me. They finally got to a point they started saying that, you know, there were people that were coming into their city that are starting fires so that they can loot. You know, and they kept saying the word loot. And then they started talking about protesters from Portland. And it was just like, you know, it was, it was all like, it was coming to me before, but it was coming to me in a way where it's like, okay, maybe but there's no way but then they started asking those questions. I was like, oh, okay, they really do believe that I'm an antifa starting the fires right now like, okay, fuck.

Yeah, using words like like looting and then they started talking about protesting. Fuck, and then it took a little bit before Justin and Sergio even saw and it was Justin who came down first and started to like talking and see what's going on. Oh fuck, I just remembered too when Sergio finally like realized what was going on, he came up to us and he's like, are you threatening us, man? Yeah, yeah, not and not physically nobody touched us, but just like body language and the way that they were being the way that they were positioned and like slowly like, you know, edging forward when they would be speaking. We were, I think once when Sergio got involved, him and Justin were just trying to be like listen we're just trying to take pictures like we're not going to bother you like, like whatever and also like we we also tried to explain to them like we're not here to like make this political or dehumanize anyone or whatever like we're here with like sympathy and you know like we're again this is like a humanitarian issue this is like what the fuck. Yeah, you know we're not here to be like yeah like you know burn those whatever like no, none of that. So they really wanted us to just like pack it up and go back to Portland.

You know and they were kind of insinuating that they would have their eyes on us they took a picture of all of our faces they took a picture of license plate. So yeah, it's kind of creepy but but I will tell you for sure, none of us really realized what happened until like a few hours later because we were fine, we were all fine. And I was tweeting about it like, lol guess what happened. And then like an hour or two later we're just like fuck. Like we got held up at gunpoint. The city like by the time we got to where we stopped that area was all burnt down already. So had something happened, there's a good chance no one would have found out about it. As we came to learn later the cops are all very pro these right wing militias over there. So the seriousness of it definitely didn't kick in until a lot later. But what were protesters actually doing during this time?

Well, many of the people being labeled as rioters and having rumors of arson spread about them were out in the community trying to help as many victims of the fires as possible. Alyssa continues. You know, Portland, like mutual aid groups from Portland were driving all the way down to Eugene to drop off supplies and back like, you know, countless times back and forth. So that was, that was really great. Just seeing, you know, what we're capable of. And I think at first, you know, we talked about the protests kind of slowing down for the fires. And I think a lot of it at first was because it was unhealthy to go outside. But I think a huge part of it too is like wanting to prioritize like there's people that need help right now. And like if we don't get on this, like, you know, this is this is part of what we're here for.

This is this is part of anarchy, you know. And yeah, just seeing people really like commit was really incredible. I mean, did you make it down to mall? Even from team raccoon had been coordinating filter exchanges and sourcing gas masks for children and rapidly change their focus as the area was smothered by smoke. Yeah, yeah, I was really fortunate to get to kind of collaborate with a lot of mutual aid groups for malts, the mutual aid Lloyd theater and also mama, Milwaukee area mutual aid. We decided to move malt to mama because it was damp out because of all the smoke cover. And we were getting lots of donations of cloth goods like blankets and mattresses even and clothing and all kinds of things that we didn't want to mildew. But yeah, I was on the ground giving out respirators a lot at malts.

I have a really fond memory of giving a respirator to an eight year old in a spider man's shirt. And the eight year old was on a scooter just scooting around pretending to be a robot spider man now that they had their respirator on. And that was fun. We had fun that day. But yeah, I, I was kind of just giving respirators out like candy during wildfire disaster relief. So I'm not totally sure how many went out just for that. But it was quite a bit. Basically, we were trying to make sure that everybody who was going on supply runs to the actual camps themselves was getting a box of respirators to give out in case there were any people that were really struggling any asthmatics any people that had respiratory ailments because we had the worst air quality in the entire world. I gave, I remember I gave a box of like, I think it was like 18 respirators to somebody who was like, I actually work in an asthma clinic and I know a lot of patients and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, here you go.

Here is a box of 18 respirators. The Ewoks transformed an empty mall parking lot into a fire relief aid station almost overnight, becoming a node for a tremendous amount of supplies and care to both evacuees as well as the houseless community that had nowhere to go to get out of the smoke. When the fires first started raging, there was this moment, sort of, I remember it being a Tuesday or a Wednesday just after the fires had started where the protests calmed down a little bit, largely because it was a safety issue to be out in the smoke inhalation. And even though all of our gear is built to protect from CS gas, that doesn't necessarily translate to smoke air everywhere. In taking a look at what the community requests were Ewoks social media got a lot of requests of calls for medical support calls for supply provision. The other orgs that are headed by Ewoks organizers began getting requests through their social media. And it became really clear that the aid sites that were previously established were overworked and then affected and they're functioning. Mostly because of the amount of people that they had coming through and the issues that happened when you have those that many people with different views really meeting in the middle.

When the Red Cross and the Salvation Army established a base at Clackamas Town Center, our intent was initially to be further down south with them. But when that site quickly reached capacity in the overflow went to the Oregon Convention Center, we realized that there was going to be a whole group of people that weren't being serviced by the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army also does not provide any sort of food or diapers and their clothing supplies are pretty much limited to what you can carry. The Malt site and Malt is an acronym that stands for Mutual Aid at Lloyd Theater. We established in the Lloyd Movie Theater parking lot, thankfully the manager of that parking lot did not have an issue with it. But we began doing all of the supply provision that the Salvation Army and the Oregon Convention Center was unprepared to do. We also found that we were getting a high level of migrant communities and minority communities that might otherwise feel grossly uncomfortable with organizations that have appeared to have government participation and cooperation in the past. When sort of roll through started to slow down and the Oregon Convention Center began to stabilize as paired with the breaking of the fire line and the actual fire danger moving a little bit further south, we moved into the Clackamas area.

And our goal was finding a site that was going to be safe for humans to come through no matter what their resident or minority community status was to receive services, but also to be close enough to jump further down south if that was what was necessary. Well, when we established the Momma site, and now that I'm thinking about it, I can't remember what Momma stands for and I apologize. Momma stands for Milwaukee Area Mutual Aid. There we go, thanks T. When we established the Momma site, we had every intention of continuing to move further down south. Something really amazing happened while we were there and putting us inside the mutual aid area of Milwaukee allowed us to have resources within other organizations within the community and the mutual aid network to send supplies further down south without having to move our site. That location ended up being really key in terms of being able to move supplies, gain supplies and seek community needs. And it also highlighted the needs that we were not able to meet within that which was the property damage and the economic impacts of having lost everything. In that respect, it allowed us to move more supplies to safer locations for humans because we were able to see that that was happening and able to pre-plan for what their future coming needs would be.

Some of those supply lines are still open and we are still funneling about supplies that have just been passed around groups since then. May I jump in? Yeah, please do. Super, so a couple of things I'd like to add. One of the things that was really important about Malt or mutual aid at Lloyd Theater, we were able to address the needs of our houseless community that did not want to go inside and stay at the convention center. So one of the things that we did is we sourced pretty much every respirator that was still in existence in the Portland Metropolitan area. I had volunteers calling everybody, getting inventories, making purchases and delivering the respirators and filters to the houseless folks at C-3PO and other camps where people were just left to their own devices. I hear that the city or county was trying to find respirators on eBay, but of course we had better connections. And then we were able to make sure that our houseless community had their needs met before we moved to mama. And I think the really important part about mama was that it allowed people who were not safe at the Clackamas Town Center location to access mutual aid.

The immigrant and refugee community, LGBTQ community, there was a real disconnect in terms of providing safer spaces for people at the Clackamas Town Center site. I think that's all I really wanted to add. The fires took a community that was based around brutality and trauma and helped remind people that not only do we take care of us, but that mutual aid and support were also the basis for larger change. After forming bonds and clouds of tear gas, there was something poetic and protesters turning their focus outwards to support others in a region where the air had been rendered unbreatable. After the fires, more mutual aid and support would be directed outside of the immediate protestor community and towards those displaced by fire, the chronically houseless, and those facing eviction. While these centers of collective care and support were forming among protesters, another group had been preparing to mobilize in Portland. In our next episode, we'll talk about how the proud boys and far-right extremists were capitalizing on the same paranoia that had made malicious form checkpoints and start preparing for a violent return to the city. To round us out, though, here are some final thoughts on mutual aid from activist Krim Brule, the Ewoks, Courtney from Wall of Moms, and the Street Mechanic Block.

One of the things I'd like to say is defund the police and invest in community, and one of the things my mom was on really, is she's like, that's your moniker, and they're not letting you do one thing, just like, you can do the other thing. It's like helping people that need help, and we want to view society where the police aren't needed for every goddamn thing. The police aren't needed to harass houseless people in various locations. The police aren't needed to respond to various mental health situations of all kinds all over the city. The police don't have the presence they do, and the potential they do to escalate every goddamn situation. So what we can do instead of taking away their power directly and actually burning down PPA is just take their jobs in the sense of take away all their responsibilities and leave them with nothing to do. Because that's the goal at the end of the day, right, is to have everyone in the community taken care of. That's all we want.

You know, it's like I said, they're through lines, they're like Black Lives Matter, anti-fascism, like bossing a police. It's like we all just want the community taken care of, and all these people who see that need to be done through whatever different or specific lenses we need. So yeah, it's more of a, I hope it continues to be this way, I think it will, is becoming more of a think of people are organizing action that is directly benefiting their community. The one thing that really stands out is that Portland's infrastructure is what makes it possible for us to continue to stay out here and do this work. And to continue to persist even as those that hold onto white supremacist structures really cling to the dying, gasping breaths of it. If you are in another city and you are looking to form your own mutual aid support network, firstly and foremost, this is going to be a massive collaboration effort. It's going to feel like you want to do everything because everything needs to be done. And so the most important steps that you can take is recognizing your lane and recognizing how to stay in your lane and recognizing how to let your lane meet other people's lanes. I think that just like the sense of like communities and people taking care of each other. We're in a pandemic and a lot of people just don't even have jobs that are working right now.

And the House of Community is only like getting larger and the police are attacking the House of Community as well. So just seeing people rally around to take care of our community while the government and the police that we actually pay with our tax dollars are not doing shit to help people right now at this moment. Seeing us gather around and really take care of each other even though like we don't personally know each other. We're still, you know, everyone is still a family and doing everything they can to provide the necessities to live to each other. I think that that's like something that's been really amazing is all of the mutual aid that's come out of this. What's been going on here in Portland is really beautiful. People are like able to make rent. People are starting to get jobs through other people's connections. People are able to eat. You know, people are like providing shelter and, you know, things to live to the House of Community after like they've been taken and slashed by the police. So I think that that's just something that outside of all of the protests is really amazing to see this community come together. And I actually took my children down to jail support to drop off some things this past weekend in Vancouver and it was just a really great opportunity to show them how we, as a community, need to take care of each other

and how much love is around all of this. It's hard for my kids to kind of understand what's going on and see like why I might put them to bed and then, you know, leave them with their dad to like go out every night. And I'm sure, and they see certain things like on the news and stuff. So they have like, I tried to explain to them what's really going on, but it was really important for me to take them this weekend to show them that like we do have like we, we always say like we got us like we really do. And explaining to them that if anyone's going to take care of our community, like it's going to be at the end of the day. So I just am like trying to eradicate my children at a young age and just teach them at a young age that, you know, that in the end, we are the ones that take care of each other. I think about a lot in terms of where, where things are going is just about like all the skills that everybody's learning from whatever they're doing. There are so many different mutually like groups and blocks popping up and trying to like create material action. But there's also a ton of things that are being learned on the street and there are a ton of things being learned in terms of organizing protests and direct actions and media campaigns and all of these other kinds of things. And I think that as the protests continue and as the kind of resistance to the powers that be continues. I'm really hopeful that we'll all continue to grow and get better at what we're doing so that we can really like keep pushing forward and build the world that we want to see. I have a couple things. First, anybody can do it. Anybody. It doesn't matter how small it doesn't matter what you're doing. You can be part of a larger scale operation in the sense of if you have something you can provide it, even if it's like helping something dig something off of the internet or, you know, telling you, this is how this thing works. Anybody can do that and also do not be afraid to ask people for help if you don't understand something or if you just need help in terms of like resources.

Like, these things are there and the more people that are involved, the easier it becomes. Does that make sense? Yes. And that also mutual aid can be as small as it needs to be and as quiet as it needs to be. So something like helping your neighbor jump a car, like, that can be mutual aid. It's like, you can start a group and raise $10,000 over the course of a few months and, you know, like give people vehicles that's also mutual aid. You don't need to like, you know, create weird hierarchies or kind of prioritize one form of it over the another. It's really just like a means for helping each other. Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about and we're here to change that. I'm April Dinwoody, host of the new podcast, Navigating Adoption, presented by AdoptUS Kids. Each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts. Visit adoptuskids.org slash podcast or subscribe to Navigating Adoption, presented by AdoptUS Kids.

Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the Ad Council. Give us your attention. We need everything you got fast. Waiting on reparations would be the endless podcast. Tune in every Thursday, politics and wordplay. We fight for the people because they got us in the worst way. From the hill to Brazil Bombay to Can't get. From the left enclave to what the neocons say. Every Thursday cop the heady conversation and break us off with some break as we're waiting on reparations.

Listen to Waiting on reparations on iHeartRadioApp, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. Baby Beluga. So, who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we look like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys has no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.